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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • In phylogeny, genomic is just another tool. The point is that turtles are os course animals, but they do branch off of different reptile groups if you look at morphological evidence (which includes fossil data) or at molecular (genetic) evidence (which only includes extant species). This is not something frequent, as usually molecular evidence tends to strengthen previous morphologically established evolutionary relationships. And even though molecularists are more numerous today, their methods are neither better or worse than anatomy.

    Phylogeny is not as straightforward as some people make it seem, and especially molecular phylogeny tends to rely on abstract concepts that can’t always be backed up by biological evidence (I’m not saying it’s wrong, it’s very often very good, juste that a lot of people doing it do not understand the way it works, and thus can’t examine the process critically).

    And so turtles’ origin are still very much an active debate!











  • Yes, and as someone who is probably close to a 5yo’s knowledge on the topic, I don’t know anything (or close to that) on either programming or other parts of being “tech savvy”. Thus me saying that coming on the ELI5 community and saying “yeah I actually want a very much not 5yo answer type” is not the spirit, I’d much rather like first basic answers, and eventually other comments going more in-depth, like we see in the majority of posts here